but it’s decontam for you.”
A second soldier-an officer, I guessed-had come back to the hummer.
“No time. Civs have to be out by twenty three hundred.”
The medic puffed his cheeks.
“This is not procedure…”
“Procedure?” the officer said. “With a whole fucking city coming apart around us? But I guarantee you this, the Americans will go fucking ballistic if we fuck with one of their spooks. A surface scrub’ll do…”
They took me over to a big boxy truck with a biohazard symbol on the side. It was parked well away from the other vehicles. I was shivering from shock. I made no complaint as they shaved all hair from my body. Someone gently took away the army jacket and showed me where to stand. Three men unrolled high-pressure hoses from the side of the truck and worked me from top to bottom. The water was cold, and hard enough to be painful. My skin burned. I twisted and turned to try to keep it away from my nipples and the tender parts of my body. On the third scrub, I realized what they were doing, and remembered.
“Take me to decontam!” I shouted. “I want to go to decontam! My family’s there, don’t you realize?”
The men would not listen to me. I do not think they even knew it was a young woman’s body they were hosing down. No one listened to me. I was dried with hot air guns, given some loose fatigues to wear, then put in the back of a diplomatic hummer that drove very fast through the streets to the airport. We did not go to the terminal building. There, I might have broken and run. We went through the wire gates, and straight to the open back of a big Russian transport plane. A line of people was going up the ramp into the cavern of its belly. Most of them were white, many had children, and all were laden with bags and goods. All were refugees, too…like me.
“My family is back there, I have to get them,” I told the man with the security scanner at the foot of the ramp.
“We’ll find them,” he said as he checked off my Judas chip against the official database. “That’s you.
Good luck.” I went up the metal ramp into the plane. A Russian woman in uniform found me a seat in the middle block, far from any window. Once I was belted in I sat trembling until I heard the ramp close and the engines start up. Then I knew I could do nothing, and the shaking stopped. I felt the plane bounce over the concrete and turn onto the runway. I hoped a terrible hope: that something would go wrong and the plane would crash and I would die. Because I needed to die. I had destroyed the thing I meant to save and saved the thing that was worthless. Then the engines powered up and we made our run and though I could see only the backs of seats and the gray metal curve of the big cabin, I knew when we left the ground because I felt my bond with Kenya break and my home fall away beneath me as the plane took me into exile.
I pause now in my story now, for where it goes now is best told by another voice.
MY name is Sean. It’s an Irish name. I’m not Irish. No bit of Irish in me, as you can probably see. My mum liked the name. Irish stuff was fashionable, thirty years ago. My telling probably won’t do justice to Tendeleo’s story; I apologize. My gift’s numbers. Allegedly. I’m a reluctant accountant. I do what I do well, I just don’t have a gut feel for it. That’s why my company gave me all the odd jobs. One of them was this African-Caribbean-World restaurant just off Canal Street. It was called I-Nation-the menu changed every week, the ambience was great and the music was mighty. The first time I wore a suit there, Wynton the owner took the piss so much I never dressed up for them again. I’d sit at a table and poke at his VAT returns and find myself nodding to the drum and bass. Wynton would try out new grooves on me and I’d give them thumbs up or thumbs down. Then he’d fix me coffee with this liqueur he imported from Jamaica and that was the afternoon gone. It seemed a shame to invoice him.
One day Wynton said to me, “You should come to our evening sessions. Good music. Not this fucking bang bang bang. Not fucking deejays. Real music. Live music.”
However, my mates liked fucking deejays and bang bang bang so I went to I-Nation on my own. There was a queue but the door staff nodded me right in. I got a seat at the bar and a Special Coffee, compliments of the house. The set had already begun, the floor was heaving. That band knew how to get a place moving. After the dance set ended, the lead guitarist gestured offstage. A girl got up behind the mic. I recognized her-she waitressed in the afternoons. She was a small, quiet girl, kind of unnoticeable, apart from her hair which stuck out in spikes like it was growing back after a Number Nought cut with the razor.
She got up behind that mic and smiled apologetically. Then she began to sing, and I wondered how I had never thought her unnoticeable. It was a slow, quiet song. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t need to, her voice said it all: loss and hurt and lost love. Bass and rhythm felt out the depth and damage in every syllable. She was five foot nothing and looked like she would break in half if you blew on her, but her voice had a stone edge that said, I’ve been where I’m singing about. Time stopped, she held a note then gently let it go. I-Nation was silent for a moment. Then it exploded. The girl bobbed shyly and went down through the cheering and whistling. Two minutes later she was back at work, clearing glasses. I could not take my eyes off her. You can fall in love in five minutes. It’s not hard at all.
When she came to take my glass, all I could say was, “that was…great.”
“Thank you.”
And that was it. How I met Ten, said three shit words to her, and fell in love.
I never could pronounce her name. On the afternoons when the bar was quiet and we talked over my table she would shake her head at my mangling the vowel sounds.
“Eh-yo.”
“Ay-oh?”
The soft spikes of hair would shake again. Then, she never could pronounce my name either. Shan, she would say.
“No, Shawn.”
“Shone…”
So I called her Ten, which for me meant Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One.
And she called me Shone. Like the sun. One afternoon when she was off shift, I asked Boss Wynton what kind of name Tendeleo was.
“I mean, I know it’s African, I can tell by the accent, but it’s a big continent.”
“It is that. She not told you?”
“Not yet.”
“She will when she’s ready. And Mr. Accountant, you fucking respect her.”
Two weeks later she came to my table and laid a series of forms before me like tarot cards. They were Social Security applications, Income Support, Housing Benefit.
“They say you’re good with numbers.”
“This isn’t really my thing, but I’ll take a look.” I flipped through the forms. “You’re working too many hours… they’re trying to cut your benefits. It’s the classic welfare trap. It doesn’t pay you to work.”
“I need to work,” Ten said.
Last in line was a Home Office Asylum Seeker’s form. She watched me pick it up and open it. She must have seen my eyes widen.
“Gichichi, in Kenya.”
“Yes.”
I read more.
“God. You got out of Nairobi.”
“I got out of Nairobi, yes.”
I hesitated before asking, “Was it bad?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was very bad.”
“I?” I said.
“What?”
“You said ‘I.’ I was very bad.”
“I meant it, it was very bad.”
The silence could have been uncomfortable, fatal even. The thing I had wanted to say for weeks rushed into the vacuum.
“Can I take you somewhere? Now? Today? When you finish? Would you like to eat?”
“I’d like that very much,” she said.
Wynton sent her off early. I took her to a great restaurant in Chinatown where the waiters ask you before you
